On Monday night at Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute in Toronto, a few dozen interested parties attended a discussion on religious accommodation within the Toronto District School Board.

This may have the perverse effect of reigniting a debate that had died down since the summer, when a tiny group of angry Hindus objected to Muslim prayer services being conducted on Friday afternoons in the cafeteria at Valley Park Middle School, just across the street from Garneau C.I.

Later, however, is definitely better than never.

A lot of very reasonable people, not just militant secularists and feminists, were profoundly unsettled by the idea of congregational prayer being held during class time in a public school, and by the gender segregation that this entails. The most interesting revelation at this event was how easily the school came to the decision to bring Friday prayers in-house, and how easily this could have been avoided if anyone in charge shared these concerns.

Jim Spyropoulos, who is the TDSB’s coordinating superintendent, inclusive schools, student, parent and community, laid out the now-familiar rationale: Students were leaving school to go to mosque on Fridays. Some weren’t making it there, and some weren’t making it back — and were a disruption to the other students if they did return.

And what if something happened on the journey? Valley Park is at a busy corner. Six lanes of traffic cross four.

“In my opinion,” said Mr. Spyropoulos, “it was an accident waiting to happen.”

A retired teacher argued this isn’t any of the school’s business — Friday prayers are just like 300 kids having dentist appointments at the same time, and it’s up to the parents to get them there and back.

But allowances have always been made to the public school calendar for the faithful children it inconveniences. It’s perfectly logical to treat Friday prayers like a religious holiday that comes once a week.

After a long back-and-forth, one astute gentleman sliced through the debate like a hot kirpan through holy water. The issues as laid out by Mr. Spyropoulos, he said, had nothing to do with religion at all.

“Students were going to religious instruction,” he said. “The issue was safety and the instructional time they were losing.”

“If the issue is transportation and safety and the intersection, get crossing guards,” he suggested. “Get a bus. Get the community to provide transportation there and back.”

Eureka! Islamophobes and secularist jihadis aside, this would address everyone’s concerns. It would ensure the public school day remains free of religious proselytization and the perceived negatives that go with it. And it would eliminate the question of choice.

One Grade Eight Valley Park student insisted students face no pressure to pray and no consequences if they don’t, that gender segregation “just makes sense,” and that not praying during menstruation is a welcome “exemption,” not an insult.

This girl kicks ass and takes names, by the sounds of it.

“We are not stupid and we are not weak,” she fumed.

But as yet another very astute attendee noted, the fact so many children weren’t making it to mosque on their own raises doubts. Attendance is up since the prayers were moved.

It’s not a public school’s place to facilitate children’s attendance at religious services — that’s private family business. The very idea of a student feeling pressure to fulfill an unwanted religious obligation on public school property, during the school day, turns my stomach.

The TDSB seems not to care about any of this.

Indeed, as Mr. Spyropoulos said many times, this is all board policy. The Guidelines and Procedures for the Accommodation of Religious Requirements stipulates that “where possible, schools should allocate space for congregational prayer.” Not where “absolutely necessary” — where “possible.”

Official secularism is one of the few Canadian values we agree on. If it’s not practised in public schools, then what’s the point of it? This policy is astounding, patently misguided and well-established: It dates from 2000.

(There are lots of other tidbits in those guidelines to talk about, too. Do parents whose religion proscribes the study of certain forms of art, music and dance have the right to influence their children’s schools’ curricula? The answer may surprise you.)

So, this is not Valley Park Middle School’s problem. It isn’t fair the students feel targeted. (People have threatened to protest outside the school itself, which is obscene.)

What we’re talking about here is the very nature of public education — which doesn’t seem to be quite what we thought it was, as one parent put it Monday night.

The discussion I witnessed — feisty, heated, but almost entirely respectful and fearsomely intelligent — suggests we’re well up to debating these issues and fixing the problems.

Public education officials will hide behind their policies and the Charter of Rights & Freedoms. But public schools don’t belong to them or to any one group of parents and schools — the clue is in the name — and policies were made to be changed.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/religion/chris-selley-religious-training-is-a-familys-job-not-a-schools/feed/0stdOne student at Valley Park Middle School insisted students face no consequences if they do not pray.Tempers flare at meeting on Toronto school’s Muslim prayer sessionshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/religion/tempers-flare-at-meeting-on-toronto-schools-muslim-prayer-sessions
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/religion/tempers-flare-at-meeting-on-toronto-schools-muslim-prayer-sessions#commentsTue, 22 Nov 2011 04:14:08 +0000http://life.nationalpost.com/?p=46118

By Tristin Hopper

TORONTO • What was advertised as a “discussion” on the issue of Muslim prayers at a Toronto school quickly turned into an emotionally charged speaker’s corner Monday night.

The prayers are conducted every Friday for about 45 minutes in the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School. The measure was introduced as a matter of convenience since Muslim students — who make up 90% of the student body at the grades 6 to 8 school — were leaving class on Friday afternoons to walk to a nearby mosque.

The prayers are not conducted by a religious leader, but by the students themselves, the superintendent of inclusive schools for the Toronto District School Board told those in attendance at Monday’s meeting. It was held across the street from Valley Park, at Marc Garneau Collegiate on Overlea Boulevard.

Related

“We have not heard one dissenting voice from within the school,” Jim Spyropoulos said.

Nevertheless, after the issue was made public during the summer, the 45-minute prayer session prompted protests outside district headquarters and letters trickled in “from across North America,” said Mr. Spyropoulos. “I don’t think there’s too many issues that have engendered the passion that this one has,” he said.

The meeting of about 40 to 50 people was meant as a community discussion, but some attendees were eager to talk about an anonymously printed pamphlet titled “Segregation in Toronto Public Schools” — a reference to the practice of separating boys and girls during prayer sessions.

Gender segregation did indeed dominate the two-hour meeting. One middle-aged woman said she was an alumnus of Valley Park and still kept up with Muslim, Jewish and Christian friends from her school days. “I want everybody to grow up together. I want accommodation, but I want those girls up front,” she said.

An older English woman who identified herself as an unwilling veteran of countless school-imposed Lord’s Prayers agreed. “I can’t stand by and watch girls be segregated in a public environment,” she said.

“The gender issue’s a tough one,” said Mr. Spyropoulos, but justified it by saying that the prayer group itself “does not happen under the auspices of the [school] board.”

Officials from the school board were in attendance to answer questions, but mostly they just kept order as speakers took turns making speeches. Several times, Manon Gardiner, chief academic officer for the TDSB, was forced to employ a well-refined teacher’s voice to tell attendees to refrain from “cross-talk.”

Few students from Valley Park were at the meeting, save for a row of girls in hijabs.

One of them, Anna, accused “outsiders” in the room of imposing their views on Valley Park students. “We’re angry because people are telling us what’s good for us … they think we’re stupid or weak and can’t decide for ourselves,” she said.

As for the controversial issue of menstruating girls being excluded from prayer sessions, she said “if you have cramps or backaches, you don’t want to pray.”

Anti-prayer speakers dominated the dialogue, but parents and community members in support of the practice reminded the crowd that the prayers are not mandatory.

“This is a program of choice … suggestions that we want to oppose our view on others is wrong,” said one man.